The N2 is the longest highway in South Africa. It starts at an intersection near the docks in Cape Town, follows the eastern seaboard of the country (roughly), then bends inland below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga.

It is 2,241km long. Can it be done justice in 2,241 words?

Original (and longer) version published in the wonderful Prufrock magazine: www.prufrock.co.za

The Last Days of Nelson Mandela. New Statesman, 10 October 2013. Cover Story.
...Caught off-guard in someone else’s charade, resisting it, indignant, defiant – the image captures something of Mandela’s ubiquity and distance, the hypervisibility but simultaneous opacity of the man. And just as his passing is not fitting any of the pre-rehearsed scripts, so his words, preserved in the world memory of the internet, point towards some other, different calculus of the political and personal that has already passed away – a language that is anachronistic, delayed, unsettlingly late...

The 14th of February was an eerie day in Cape Town: the heat, the road closures, the sense of a city under lockdown ahead of President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address that Valentine’s Day evening. And all the while, in a gated complex in Pretoria, where Reeva Steenkamp, the 29-year-old model and girlfriend of the Olympian/Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, had been shot, the biggest news story of the year was breaking... [Continue reading]Original magazine article [PDF].

A winning piece written by a South African academic working in the shadow of the Booker-winning author.

There is an odd made-for-television documentary from 1997 which shows footage of JM Coetzee conducting a guided tour of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. From the slopes of Table Mountain he points out the hospital where he was born; the suburb of Plumstead where he lived as a young boy; the university campus where he spent much of his academic career. A colleague recalls how Coetzee would not take calls from the Booker prize committee because he was invigilating undergraduate exams: a measure of his professionalism. We visit his Standard Three classroom at Rosebank Primary and the grassy common where he participated in school sports days. He recalls taking gold in the running backwards race of 1948, as if enjoying a wry joke at the expense of anyone who thought that such an exercise might grant some privileged insight into his work... [Continue reading...]

These somewhat unfair thoughts are stirred by Disgrace, which is a very good novel, almost too good a novel...It sometimes reads as if it were the winner of an exam whose challenge was to create the perfect specimen of a very good contemporary novel.

James Wood, ‘Coetzee's Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts’, The Irresponsible Self (2004).

‘A literary battle cry for the creation of a new genre’…‘Raw and gorgeous’… ‘A work of virtuoso banditry’.

The first and most childish reason for me wanting to pick a fight with David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) is that it comes absolutely swaddled in praise from London and New York. My Vintage edition is loud yellow and fire-engine red, like a dangerous wasp, with quotes, puffs and blurbs slathered all over it. ‘A sort of bible for the next generation of culture-makers’…‘an invigorating shakedown of the literary status quo’ and (most cringe-inducing of all): ‘This dude’s book is the hip-hop album of the year’.

Not only do they occupy the back and spill over onto several pages at the front; they also creep onto the cover, even over the title typeface itself, where a critic as tough-minded as Tim Parks salutes this ‘protean polemic’. Other undeniably brainy novelists like Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith also weigh in respectfully, even as Shields inveighed against their chosen medium in interviews: well-wrought literary fictions à la Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan, were, he told The Observer in 2010, ‘antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian novel mode. In no way do they convey what if feels like to live in the 21st century. Like most novels, they are essentially works of nostalgic entertainment’. What exactly was going on here?

For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of yourself; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem...

...We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Virginia Woolf, ‘The Modern Essay’ (1925).

UCT lecturer in English Hedley Twidle presents the work of his top three graduate students from a seminar he ran this year on writing professional review essays. In this, the first of a three-part feature, SLiPnet presents Twidle’s introductory thoughts on the review essay as a literary-critical form, followed by UCT graduate student Anneke Rautenbach’s review of Dana Snyman’s book, The Long Way Home.

What is a review? What is an essay? And what is a review essay?

We discussed these questions during a recent seminar on (so-called) literary non-fiction at the University of Cape Town. The idea was to explore more varied, public and perhaps more lucrative modes of writing about literature than the research “paper”, or end-of-term “assignment” – both rather insipid terms for the kind of pieces that Honours and Masters students are required to produce.

In bald economic terms, postgraduate study consists in paying someone to read your work (sometimes a couple of external examiners too) and there it ends. But what about getting paid, and so contributing to a wider dialogue, all without sacrificing intelligence, rigour and (if necessary) difficulty? And how much self can one insert into an essayistic response to a text before it becomes self-indulgent? [Continue reading...]

The Future Eaters.Streamlined version at The Daily Maverick.In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon performs a dense but stylish call to activism, writes HEDLEY TWIDLE.

On Edward Said:

He thrived on intellectual complexity while aspiring to clarity; he taught and wrote as if – and I know this should sound unremarkable for a literature professor – he yearned to be widely understood. His approach felt fervent, luminous when measured against the alternatives: close readings sealed against the world or deconstructionist seminars in which the stakes were as obscure as the language, as we poked at dead-on-delivery prose in the hopes of rousing enough life from it for our exertions to qualify as “play” … He understood that it is far more difficult to theorize with the cunning of lightness than it is to fob off some seething mess of day-old neologisms as an “intervention”. His devotion to style became integral to his political idealism and inseparable from his belief in insurrectionary outwardness.

Rob Nixon, Preface, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011).